Much ado about Marco Rubio's new Chinese name
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According to the Washington Post (5/14/26)
The old Ru/Lu (卢) was a neutral character typically used for surnames. The new one (鲁) carries a different meaning: rash, rude and clumsy.
Selected readings
- "PRC Foreign Minister Wang Yi's not-so-subtle reprimand falls on deaf ears" (2/10/25)
- "Transcription matters" (1/22/25)
Chris Button said,
May 14, 2026 @ 11:55 am
鲁 is an ancient state name, so I'm not sure if it carries negative connotations on its own (i.e., when not compounded with other syllables with such connotations).
I'd be interested to hear a native speaker's take.
Leonard Bick said,
May 14, 2026 @ 2:28 pm
It would be nice to give credit to the CBC explainer. He is Andrew Chang (no information on how is name is transcribed into Chinese).
Joshua K. said,
May 14, 2026 @ 9:09 pm
The People's Republic of China is very unhappy with the movement for the independence of "Táiwān". By the logic of changing the tone of Marco Rubio's name, maybe the Republic of China should change the name of its island to "Tāiwān", and then everything would be fine.
Peter Cyrus said,
May 15, 2026 @ 4:26 am
The inner clip shows a Chinese woman explaining to us ignorant Westerners that tones are very important, but the first two Chinese proposals for sound-based spelling – Latinxua Sinwenz and Zhuyin Zimu – didn't bother to indicate tones. Gwoyeu Romatzyh DID record tones, in a unique manner that was both its glory and its downfall, but the first system to use diacritics was apparently the Yale romanization. Zhuyin only added the Yale tone marks when the ROC adopted it in favor of Pinyin, which also uses the Yale diacritics. The pre-revolutionary foreign systems, like Wade-Giles, used digits for tones.
So it seems foreigners care more about tones than Chinese.
Philip Taylor said,
May 15, 2026 @ 6:25 am
I don't think that your conclusion follows from your premises, Peter. Appreciation of tone is innate to the Chinese, so they feel no need to indicate it explicitly (think of hanzi). To we ignorant westerners, however, tone is something we have to learn to appreciate, and therefore we seek to have it indicated wherever possible. And speaking as an "ignorant westerner", I find toneless pinyin a true PITA, whereas I imagine that Victor (for example) can read toneless Pinyin as easily as I can read Pinyin with all tones clearly marked. In fact, not just "as easily", but in truth "far more easily".
Chris Button said,
May 15, 2026 @ 6:29 am
I can't find the reference right now, but I thought tones were noted from the outset? Wasn't it just the way of noting them that changed later on?
Chris Button said,
May 15, 2026 @ 6:53 am
I wonder if it used the old dot notation that is well known from its use in old Japanese documents for marking tone?
Since Chinese scholars were acutely aware of tones (as attested in the old rhyme books), I would be surprised if they had just ignored them when creating Bopomofo.
M. Paul Shore said,
May 15, 2026 @ 7:17 am
A warning to Language Log readers who aren't familiar with basic Mandarin: don't trust this Andrew Chang guy's pronunciations, especially of the tones and especially of third tone! He's just not good at it and makes lots of mistakes, including important mistakes related to tone sandhi (one of which is a fairly crucial one). To his credit, he's appropriately self-deprecating on the whole matter.
While Chang makes his point about the Mandarin tone system in a way that presumably will be more or less comprehensible by lay viewers, still the way he talks about mā, má, mǎ, and mà–"same syllables, but the way you say them matters"–is disturbing in its Euro-linguistic-hegemonic cecity, operating on an unthinking assumption that, while vowel and consonant phonemes are of primary or basic importance, tonemes cannot be, but can only constitute a sort of expressive decoration, however much significance they might have (according to this view) acquired by a sort of process of hypertrophy in certain languages like Mandarin. I'm reminded of Leonard Bloomfield's remarks around a century ago about the failure of modern linguistics knowledge to penetrate general education: has much changed?
Chang's use of the word "transliterating" to describe the transforming of names into Mandarin speech and writing isn't great either.
One thing I do like is Chang's description of the operating principle of the Chinese name-transformation process as "[doing] what they often do, which is to just do their best with the sounds that they have". That, at least the way Chang expresses it, describes the approach that I labeled "Non-Xenophonetic Authenticity" (NXA) in my 1/22/26 post "Authenticity of pronunciation" (https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=72656)–though in my humble opinion the Chinese typically don't actually do "their best", but rather practice an NXA sort of approach far more loosely than I'd consider advisable.
I note that whoever decided on the Lúbǐào and Lǔbǐào renditions of "Rubio" seems to have been unaware of, or uncaring about, the much-laughed-at stereotype of East Asians supposedly being universally unable to distinguish between [l] and [r]. Is that a good look for China?
I was struck by Prisca Tang's pronunciation of "pinyin" as "pingying". Are there any any Mandarin experts who might hazard a guess as to whether that's a dialectical thing with her, or whether maybe it's just something she (along with many others) does, however inexplicably, only when speaking English? I should have a better idea of the likely answer to that question, but I don't. I note that she belongs to the contingent of Mandarin speakers who fold the shui syllables into the sui syllables (and, one would have to assume, does the same with similar syllables).
M. Paul Shore said,
May 15, 2026 @ 9:26 am
[First half of second sentence of final paragraph of my post above should read:] Are there any Mandarin experts who might hazard a guess as to whether that's a dialectal thing with her,
Victor Mair said,
May 15, 2026 @ 11:42 am
Grâce à Graham Allison, this was a difficult name for Xi Jinping to pronounce in his opening remarks to President Trump: Xiūxīdǐdé 修昔底德.
Fen Yik said,
May 15, 2026 @ 1:53 pm
@M. Paul Shore – like Prisca Tang, I'm a Chinese Canadian who speaks both Cantonese and Mandarin. I think her "pingying" pronunciation is from Cantonese influence.
According to Prisca's post in the Macau Post Daily (https://www.macaupostdaily.com/news/14252), she speaks Cantonese better than she does Mandarin: "I speak fluent Cantonese and English, and when I am drunk my Mandarin is on a native level."
"Pinyin" in Cantonese is ping3 jam1 (in Jyutping), so the "ping" part would be from swapping in the velar nasal coda from Cantonese, and the "ying" part could be from a repetition of that -ing rime. Anecdotally, I can share that I've heard multiple Cantonese speakers pronounce "Pinyin" as "pingying" when speaking English. I haven't had enough conversations with Cantonese speakers in Mandarin about Pinyin to have a sense of how often they would use that pronunciation in Mandarin.
Peter Cyrus said,
May 15, 2026 @ 6:21 pm
Philip, tone is phonemic in Chinese: there are many, many words that are distinguished only by tone. Even words of two syllables, the traditional disambiguator, can differ only by tone. So if an orthography like Zhuyin Zimu didn't write tones – and Chris, I don't believe they were written at all during the period when Zhuyin Zimu was being considered as a primary orthography, not an auxiliary as it is today under the name Zhuyin Fuhao – it would have been ambiguous, specifically what's called "defective".
English also uses a defective orthography: we don't write stress, so PROject and proJECT are spelled alike. That's in addition to the normal bad spelling, like read vs read, past and present. And we still manage to read English. And the many orthographies of the word have many, many flaws, and they're still useful. My point wasn't about writing, in general.
My point was that Chinese authors mostly decided that tones didn't need to be written. Maybe they felt they were obvious enough in context, or that they differed too much among dialects to be part of the orthography, or that they just didn't have a good way to write them. Western authors didn't feel the same way.
Compare those design choices with some others. The authors of pinyin decided that it was important to write the distinction between j q x and zh ch sh, even though they're in complementary distribution and the distinction requires adding digraphs to the alphabet, but they decided it wasn't necessary to distinguish the vowels of si shi xi, even though they sound very different. Pinyin hides the fact that dui and wei rhyme, and so do liu and you. It doesn't make much sense. Design by committee, with politics as seasoning.
Chris Button said,
May 15, 2026 @ 7:07 pm
@ Peter Cyrus
The bopomofo tones were originally marked using the dot notation. I managed to find a wiki about it here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_National_Pronunciation
Philip Taylor said,
May 16, 2026 @ 3:45 am
Peter — "tone is phonemic in Chinese […]". Yes, that was (a part of) the point that I was seeking to make. Tone is fundamental to speaking and understanding Mandarin Chinese / Putonghua, but because it is intrinsic to the language, the Chinese don't feel the need to indicate it explicitly in their writing systems. They "know" (i.e., have learned) what tone is associated with each hanzi, and even when they turn to an alphabetic representation they feel no need to indicate tone explicitly because "everyone [who matters (i.e., all Chinese)]" knows how it should be pronounced. But to we "ignorant foreigners", tones are not implicit, and so we need them to be spelled out for us. Which is why I can read Pinyin with explicit tone diacritics and be easily understood by native Chinese speakers, yet given the same Pinyin with tones omitted I would make so many "criminal mistakes" (as my late French master would have termed them) that I would be an embarrassment to myself. Victor, on the other hand, with his decades of exposure to the Chinese language, is almost certainly in the same position as a native Chinese, not needing the tone diacritics because from context alone he will know which tone each syllable requires.
M. Paul Shore said,
May 16, 2026 @ 4:23 am
I completely understand Philip Taylor’s point; I’d submit, though, that just because a substantial number of pinyin users can get away to a certain extent with omitting tone indications, that doesn’t make it a good or a valid procedure to follow. It’s like the regrettably common vowel-less writing of Arabic and Hebrew: ultimately not a good idea.
Note also that the set of “everyone [who matters]” insofar as writing and reading pinyin is concerned is likely to expand greatly in the coming decades.
Jerry Packard said,
May 16, 2026 @ 7:20 am
Regarding the “pinyin" as "pingying” phenomenon, to make a long story long, the base reason is the weakening > loss of the syllable-final nasal distinctions in Mandarin (and all the other topolects as well). That final nasal weakening described so well by Matthew Chen was the topic of the first sociolinguistic analysis of Mandarin (Barale 1982) directed by W Labov, where the degree of lenition on the final nasal was found to be stratified by class, age and gender. The relevance to “pinyin" as "pingying” is that (especially younger) speakers do not distinguish final [n] and [ng], and so when asked to write 拼音 in alphabetic orthography, produce the final as randomly n/ng. That having been said, there is a minor dialectal phenomenon going on, in which many younger speakers have simply adopted ‘pingying’ as the way to write 拼音. I saw this behavior in spades when we did triage of incoming heritage Mandarin speakers at UIUC.
Philip Taylor said,
May 16, 2026 @ 7:22 am
Oh, I completely agree, MPS, omitting tone indications is most certainly not a good or valid procedure to follow. Unfortunately the Chinese railway authorities do not appear to accept this precept, and one will therefore typically find :
For example, you would typically see:
rather than
Jerry Packard said,
May 16, 2026 @ 7:27 am
P.S.: what I said about n/ng in orthography applies to the spoken language as well.
Jerry Packard said,
May 16, 2026 @ 7:32 am
As a side note on tones in pinyin, fluent native readers of pinyin are probably sight-reading rather than using phonetic reading (phonics), and so tone marks would be irrelevant to them.
Jerry Packard said,
May 16, 2026 @ 7:43 am
Courtesy of google AI:
Using a variationist sociolinguistic framework, Barale’s work A Quantitative Analysis of the Loss of Final Consonants in Beijing Mandarin identified sociodemographic patterns. She found that the weakening of these nasal endings was most likely to occur in speech among younger individuals, women, the working class, and individuals with lower levels of education
Victor Mair said,
May 16, 2026 @ 8:21 am
I have been deeply involved in the pinyin movement for more than four decades. I, and most of my colleagues in the movement, do not indicate tones when writing letters, essays, etc., but, when reading out what I and others have written, automatically and effortlessly add them — as we do accents in English, Russian, and so forth.
Peter Cyrus said,
May 16, 2026 @ 4:52 pm
Chris, great work!
Philip: yes, of course if someone knows the Hanzi – knows the meaning and pronunciation – then he doesn't need the tone written. But the whole point of sound-based transcription of Chinese is for the many cases when the hanzi isn't visible, or is unrecognized, for example for text entry, to describe pronunciation in a dictionary, to teach people new hanzi, etc. In those cases, the writer is writing pinyin or zhuyin, and the tones serve to disambiguate. In my IME, if I enter a syllable without tones, I see many more matches than with tones.
Of course a good IME can resolve many ambiguities. If I write zh g, I'll get zhongguo, but that doesn't mean the finals aren't important. And when describing pronunciation in a dictionary or primary school textbook, if the tones aren't written, there's no way for the reader to know them. So I would maintain that writing tones is essential, even for Chinese.
Chris discovered that the original version of zhuyin – zhuyin zimu – used the tone markings of MIddle Chinese, so my "no tones" claim is discredited. I'd still be curious to understand the evolution. Why did Middle Chinese needs tone markings? They were only writing in Hanzi.
I'm still trying to cobble together a narrative that makes sense. The 1913 optimism resulted in a plan to replace hanzi with zhuyin, but retaining the old tone dots. This plan – which seems reasonable to me now – ended in failure, with two name changes intended to reassure people that they weren't going to replace hanzi. But by 1928, they were already looking for alteratives, and came up with Latinxua Sinwenz (no tones) AND Gwoyeu Romatzyh (tone spelling). A decade later, both projects were dead, and the idea of a "phonetic alphabet" for Chinese, primary OR secondary, was abandoned.
… until the late 50's, a decade after the civil war, when Zhou Yougang, working in New York, ran across the Yale romanization (completely unknown in China) and told his personal friend Zhou Enlai that the Americans had a working phonetic alphabet for Chinese, with diacritics for tones. They went back to work, and came up with Hanyu Pinyin, using the Yale tone diacritics. THe ROC, not to be outdone, came up with Tongyong pinyin, but it never caught on, so they brought Zhuyin back to life.
Is that a fair summary?
Chris Button said,
May 16, 2026 @ 5:00 pm
Lots of missionary orthographies ignore tone in languages across Asia. They seem to have worked for native speakers, although I've been told they can be ambiguous at times.
M. Paul Shore said,
May 17, 2026 @ 7:12 am
Jerry Packard: Thank you for the valuable information. I’d been wondering about this matter for decades, based on my amateur observations of the speech behavior of native Mandarin speakers in English, especially their frequent pronunciation of the English word “in” as “ing”.
It makes me wonder how much farther the reduction of the syllable inventory of Mandarin is likely to go, what with final nasals merging, retroflex constants merging into denti-alveolar ones, and tones arguably being deemphasized (i.e., in speech, as discussed elsewhere in LL, not here). Of course increased polysyllabicity can always compensate for the reduction.
Chris Button said,
May 17, 2026 @ 12:58 pm
@ Peter Cyrus
Your narrative seems backward to me.
Foreigners, such as missionaries, in recent history (i.e., the past couple of centuries) often ignored tones when devising orthographies. Native speakers often didn't: sometimes they just added the tonal notations to missionary scripts; sometimes they devised their own scripts later with tone markings.
While you can get away without noting tones (in the same way Arabic script can get away without noting vowels), it makes life easier to include at least some degree of representation in the script.
Chris Button said,
May 17, 2026 @ 1:18 pm
Further back in time, note how languages that already had scripts often included some degree of "tonal" notation. Granted, those "tones" may sometimes still have been segmental at the time rather than suprasegmental, and not all suprasegmental tonal distinctions were necessarily distinguished.
Jerry Packard said,
May 18, 2026 @ 6:19 am
@M. Paul Shore
It is with all due modesty that I recommend to you Ch. 8 ‘What Can We Expect for the Chinese Language’ – esp. pp. 197-198 ‘Chinese Syllables and Sounds’ – of Packard, J. (2021) ‘A Social View on the Chinese Language’, NY: Peter Lang, which discusses such issues in unrestrained affectionate detail.
Philip Taylor said,
May 18, 2026 @ 7:24 am
I'm sure that many apart from MPS would be interested in the contents of your book, Jerry — are the pages to which you specifically refer available on-line (and un-paywalled), and if so, are you in a position to offer a hyperlink to same ?
Jerry Packard said,
May 18, 2026 @ 11:58 am
Sorry, I don’t know of any non-paywalled versions. Amazon used to make available the first two chapters for free, but I don’t know if they still do.
Philip Taylor said,
May 18, 2026 @ 1:40 pm
At least one (almost certainly unauthorised) copy can be found on the web (not the dark web, just the standard one), Jerry. I will refrain from posting a link for obvious reasons, but can confirm that the pages in question commence in the version I have located :
Michael Watts said,
May 18, 2026 @ 3:27 pm
I don't understand what point is being made here. If you look at a street sign in China it will have toneless pinyin.
If you look at a dictionary entry, or a children's book, or a museum sign that uses an exotic character, in China, it will have pinyin with the tones marked.
What's the problem supposed to be? Pinyin isn't being used as if it didn't include tone markings.
I have a much bigger problem with Western books, which seem to feel that (1) there is no reason to mark tones on pinyin names, but also (2) there is no reason to let the reader know the characters of a Chinese name at all.
Philip Taylor said,
May 18, 2026 @ 3:43 pm
Taking your first two para.s as a given, Michael, and addressing the question posed in your third, the problem is that your "average ignorant foreigner", even if he knows how to ask "Can you direct me to <somewhere> ?" in Putonghua, will not be able to express the <somewhere> if his sole exposure to it is a street sign lacking Pinyin diacritics. If (and it seems a very reasonable assumption to me) the Pinyin on street signs is intended for your "average ignorant foreigner", then the authorities are doing a great dis-service to the latter by failing to guide them as to the correct pronunciation.
Michael Watts said,
May 18, 2026 @ 4:45 pm
If you assume the street signs are directed at the Chinese, the tones are pointless because all of the names will be familiar.
I tend to agree that there's not much value in having pinyin at all if it's directed at the Chinese. If it's directed at foreigners, the primary benefit is to allow them to recognize the name of the street, whether because they're lost and need to know where they are, or because they are already in possession of directions to somewhere.
The average ignorant foreigner is neither capable of asking for directions in Chinese, nor of pronouncing pinyin tones if they are indicated. They also aren't capable of pronouncing pinyin consonants.
For a foreigner who can pronounce pinyin and wants to ask for directions in Chinese, they may be discomfited by a lack of tone markings, but it won't inhibit their communication. The inappropriate tones in their question will be a part of their foreign accent. They'll learn the correct tones from the reply, if they can.
M. Paul Shore said,
May 18, 2026 @ 11:22 pm
Philip Taylor: I have to say—politely, in accordance with Language Log’s commenting policy—that I think you owe Jerry Packard an apology, and a purchase of his book. I mean, you were admitting to being a consumer of Internet book piracy right in the face of the very author whose book has been pirated, and taking it for granted that he’d sympathize with you (perhaps in a presumed sixties-like spirit of stickin’ it to The Man, standin’ up for The People, etc., etc.).
I’m looking forward to receiving my copy of A Social View on the Chinese Language. It sounds as if it touches on a number of topics l’m curious about.
Philip Taylor said,
May 19, 2026 @ 3:20 am
MPS — If Jerry feels that I owe him an apology, then I will be more than happy to offer one, but I believed that by drawing his attention to the existence of an almost certainly unauthorised of his book I was being helpful. Had I posted a link, on the other hand, then an apology would most certainly have been required, but common sense dictated that such an action would be totally unacceptable.
Jerry Packard said,
May 19, 2026 @ 6:57 am
Naw, everything’s cool.
Philip Taylor said,
May 19, 2026 @ 7:06 am
Thank you Jerry. Let me know if you would like to be appraised of the site where I found the text to which you referred.
David Marjanović said,
May 19, 2026 @ 5:13 pm
I wonder if the difference between e.g. Sin Wenz not indicating tones and Pinyin doing that is that one of the purposes originally intended for Pinyin was to teach Standard Mandarin, with the actual phonetics of its tones included, to the rest of the country, while Sin Wenz was just intended as a casual/practical writing system for native speakers. This could also explain why Pinyin spells out a few other phonetic details that aren't phonemic under, IIRC, any of the different analyses. For fluent speakers, as confirmed above, not indicating the tones in Mandarin mostly works when there's enough context (i.e. a text as opposed to an isolated word or two), much as not indicating stress in English or Russian mostly works and not indicating the (historically) short vowels in Arabic or Persian mostly works; indeed, the phonemic tones of Latvian*, Lithuanian** or the language my last name comes from*** are almost never indicated, and the marks for the ones of Greek**** were only invented as the language was losing them (and the stress mark that survives of that system still mostly isn't used in all-caps writing).
* 3, restricted to syllables with long nuclei
** 2, restricted to stressed syllables with long nuclei
*** 4 (or 2 × length), restricted to stressed syllables, with complications
**** formerly 2, restricted to stressed syllables with long vowels or diphthongs